The Connetquot Board of Education adopted its 2026-2027 school year budget, to be voted on by residents next month, following months of disagreements over how to fill an over $3 million deficit.
If passed by voters on May 19, the $230,328,468 budget includes the excessing of nine educational positions, including five teachers, four elementary and one secondary, along with four other positions in areas including FAC, music, technology and world languages.
The proposed budget also calls for cutting two administrators and eliminating several departmental positions, consolidating director positions in areas including math and sciences, the humanities, and pupil personnel services.
These staff excesses, along with attrition in current and pending positions, including retirements, which the district said it confirmed, are among the ways Connetquot plans to fill the roughly $3 million budget gap first publicly revealed in early March.
The adopted budget would also increase the tax levy by 2.12 percent, or $3,082,521, higher than the current school year. The tax levy is below the state’s cap.
“There are a lot of tough decisions that we as a board and the cabinet had to make for this budget, and none of them were taken lightly,” said Connetquot Board of Education president Marissol Mallon. “We had to think of sustainable decisions for the district and what we could do to help progress and see into the future.”
The Connetquot Board of Education adopted its budget by a vote of 3 to 2, with trustees Sara Parisi and Melissa Torregrossa voting against, due to what they felt were too many unanswered questions about where money was coming from to fill the gap, which they said at last week’s meeting was originally closer to $16 million around October.
“This is an enormous amount of taxpayer money,” Parisi said. “And with that comes a very simple responsibility. We should fully understand it before we vote on it. Right now, I do not believe we do.”
Parisi and fellow board members have called for a forensic audit of the district’s finances to determine whether the district should be doing anything to save money.
After engaging in a back-and-forth with Robert Hauser, Connetquot Schools assistant superintendent for business and operations, over how the district came to fill its budgetary gap, Parisi even suggested that the State Comptroller’s office come in and examine the district’s finances.
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